Wink Poppy Midnight(45)

“Did you like me being her?” she asked, soft, soft.

“No,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

She turned and pulled my shirt up, and kissed my stomach, right above my belly button, her hands on my waist.

“Are you sure?”

Her lips on my ribs, across my chest . . .

“Yes, I’m sure.”

Her fingernails up my sides, gently, gently . . .

Her red curls, everywhere. . .

And then she sat up and kissed me on the mouth, lips full on mine, deep, deeper. It went on and on.

She slid her left leg over me, squeezed up her knees, right into my hips, one on each side . . .

She flipped her hair and arched her back, just the once, just in the exact right way.

And I knew.

I knew.

I pulled away, just as the first stroke of sun hit the hayloft. I pulled away and looked straight at her.

She didn’t have to say it. I read it right there in her green sunrise gaze, read it like a page in a book.

“Poppy’s not dead,” I whispered.

“Of course not,” Wink whispered back.



I WENT HOME. I showered and crawled into bed. My pillow still smelled like jasmine.

I got up in a few hours. I made tea for my dad, and brought it to him in the attic.

“You hear the sirens last night?” he asked, nose buried in an ancient copy of Don Quixote.

“Yeah. The Roman Luck house burned.”

He didn’t ask me how I knew. “Must have been the lightning.”

“Must have been.”

He nodded but didn’t look up. He knew I was lying. He didn’t say anything, though, didn’t grill me or force a confession. And he never would. For better or worse, that was my dad.

I went down to the kitchen and grabbed a map out of the drawer.

The Bell farm was quiet as I walked on by, all the animals asleep, and the humans too. The farm seemed different. It was still peaceful, and magical . . . but it had a small darkness to it now, like a black cloud on the horizon, like when Thief walks through the Forest of Sighs and hears the far-off howling of the Witch Wolves beneath the singing of the birds and the rustling of the green leaves and the murmuring of the River Red.

I turned and went down the neglected gravel road. Left, then right, then over the hill.

To the Gold Apple Mine.





I WATCHED MIDNIGHT walk down the road, and I knew where he was going.

He didn’t see me. I was good at hiding. I’d learned how, from the book Sneaks and Shadows.

I taught Poppy how to hide too. She was a quick learner.

The Wolf first came to our door on the arm of my brother Leaf. She liked him for his being so savage and wild. She had that in her too, though mostly it was all buttoned up and locked in like the drugged woman in Blood Red and White. The Wolf was younger then. She was still just Poppy. She was still just a girl, like the rest of us. And Leaf could handle Poppy. He knew what he was up against. He didn’t have a big, soft heart like Midnight, with all its wide-open windows and doors and easy ways of entering. Leaf’s heart had barbed wire and alarms and vicious, barking dogs. He was safe from her teeth.

Outside the hayloft, I was invisible. I was a ghost.

But inside the hayloft, it was different.

The first time Poppy found me up there, reading to the Orphans, she was with Leaf. Later she started coming up there just to find me. She said she wanted to hear my stories. She said she liked the way I read. And the way my hair curled. And the way my freckles reminded her of my brother.

The Wolf called me Feral outside the hayloft, but inside she called me Wink. She taught me how to keep my lips soft when I kissed. She taught me how to stroke skin with my fingertips, until the goose bumps came.

The White Witch gave Edmund Turkish Delight and convinced him to betray his brother and sisters. The Wolf kissed me and asked to be my friend. But unlike Edmund, I knew there were strings attached. I knew all the time. I knew what she wanted. I didn’t fall under her spell, like the rest, like magic words and a wand waved over a head.





I JUMPED IN the Blue Twist. I thought I might want to drown, like Virginia Woolf, even though that wasn’t the plan, had never been the plan. But I didn’t fill my pockets with stones, so maybe I wasn’t truly committed. The water turned me round and round and just when I was about to open my mouth and let it fill my lungs, the river threw me against a dead old tree and I came to a stop.

I crawled out, black dress sticking to my body like glue. I fell on the riverbank and looked up, and never felt so alive.

After that it was just me and the Bell horses and the old Gold Apple Mine by Gold Apple Creek. I slept on hay and ate wild plums. I sang my heart out in the woods, all alone, like Leaf did that one day.

I thought I might be too spoiled and princess-and-the-pea to make it alone, so much had happened since that time I’d run off to my grandpa’s cabin. But Wink had faith in me and that gave me faith in myself, and faith was something I never knew I needed until I got it from her.

I caught Wink copying my handwriting once. I figured she was up to no good, but then, I was never up to any good either, so who was I to judge.

She visited every day, and night, and brought me a fishing rod, and coffee beans, and hardboiled eggs and fruit and sandwiches and cheese and books to read. And I read all her fairy books, every last one, I read them over and over, I read them until they started making sense.